This previously unreleased track is pure yearbook-photo material, equal parts embarrassingly awkward and sweet. It feels like a jam session waiting for someone to end it. At one point, it descends into a kind of “ Dazed and Confused” psychedelic section with lots of clicks and clacks on the rims of drum heads. But this version answers the question: “What if Radiohead’s most expansive prog-rock opus was twice as long?” It’s rough and loose, with a few different lyrics. Most of the in-progress versions of “Paranoid Android” that appear on the leak are either scraps of rehearsal starting from various parts of the song or live versions from 1996, when Radiohead opened for Alanis Morissette. Here, it’s very nearly another “Fake Plastic Trees.” –Jayson Greene “Paranoid Android (Long Version)”
This Radiohead never deviated from the path suggested by The Bends. The guitars chime, the cymbals splash quietly. Hearing the full-band version of “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” without the lush Bond-theme string arrangements that made it to the finished Kid A studio version, is to see another Radiohead. But Radiohead’s alternate takes are more like alternate conceptions-different lives the songs might have lived. Normally, combing through a band’s alternate takes feels like settling on one of seven nearly-identical selfies. Larson “Motion Picture Soundtrack (Slow Full Band Version)”
It’s not mixed very carefully, but it sounds scrappy and untamed, like the band is pushing it into the red unselfconsciously. The fabled “Lift”-the song Radiohead chose not to release as the first single from OK Computer because it would have made them “too big,” the song with a story longer than this leak-was finally heard in studio-recorded form on 2017’s 20th-anniversary reissue, OKNOTOK.
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